Parade Retreat Not A Triumph For Madison

CARPENTER

June 21, 1992|by PAUL CARPENTER, The Morning Call

There were never odder bedfellows than August Kreis and James Madison. Madison has been dead 156 years, but his intellect still lives in the U.S. Constitution. Kreis is still alive, but his intellect is deader than a doornail.

Madison was born a Virginia aristocrat, became the most eloquent and inspired of the Founding Fathers and was our fourth president. Every facet of his life reflected his patriotism and his love for fellow human beings.

Kreis was born in Newark 37 years ago and is now an unemployed cabinetmaker in Bangor. He lives in a dilapidated debris-strewn house with a Confederate flag, the age-old symbol of treason and the contemporary emblem of hatred, serving as the curtain for one window.

Over the past week, Kreis created a news crescendo by planning a Fourth of July white supremacist parade in Bangor. The plans were scrapped yesterday afternoon, but not before an uproar over his insistence that parade participants be allowed to pack guns.

Borough officials decided to let Kreis and his group, the Northern Ohio Christian Posse Comitatus, have the parade but listed restrictions, including a ban on weapons. Unable to tolerate the ban, Kreis withdrew his application.

That's a victory for people who would rather have tranquility and security than constitutional principles. It was on that point that I talked to Kreis about his plans, prior to yesterday's developments. "Blacks have parades ... gays and lesbians do it," he said. "Why can't whites?"

Nobody ever said his group could not have a parade. The big stink was over the guns.

"It's a constitutional right to carry a gun ... We choose to exercise our right," Kreis said.

He said the Second Amendment does not apply only to militias, because the National Guard is not the militia the framers of the Constitution had in mind. "I believe in the unregulated militia," he said. "The reason for the Second Amendment is that if the government gets out of control, the people must have weapons ... to fight tyranny."

I asked Kreis if he knew who was primarily responsible for the Second Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights. He didn't, so I told him it was James Madison.

I also told him that he and Madison had identical views on the right to bear arms. Madison said the chief purpose of a militia was to check the power of government, which is hardly the role of today's National Guard.

Madison also said citizens should be armed so they can challenge tyranny. He did not say it was so they could hunt game, and he certainly did not want the agents of government to be the only ones armed.

You may not like it, but that's what the Founding Fathers intended, and we have held their judgment to be sacred all these years. Therefore, if you can tamper with the Second Amendment, it puts every other constitutional safeguard in great peril.

August Kreis may represent repugnant ideas, but he should have been allowed to have his parade, and marchers should have been allowed to carry their repugnant weapons. The price of remaining free is risk.

On other points, Kreis and I were less accordant. He doesn't share my feelings, for example, about mixed marriages. My wife was born in Japan, and my children and grandchildren thereby represent a white supremacist's nightmare. Kreis said America "is for white people" and whites are "God's chosen people."

He said he wants "to wake up our own race" about America being threatened and invaded by non-whites. I thought about that as I wandered around Bangor for two hours and saw nothing but white faces. As I headed to my office in Allentown yesterday, there were non-whites all over the place.

Why not target Allentown, where the threat of ethnic invasion is trenchant? Why not a white supremacist parade on Turner Street?

"Because then we'd be looking for confrontation," Kreis said.

Yes, but it would prove the courage of their constitutional convictions, and City Hall would undoubtedly let them carry guns -- because they'd need them. James Madison would understand.